What is SEO and Its Benefits?

SEO is so popular nowadays when people can see or heard it almost everywhere.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, is the way of increasing more free, organic, naturaltraffics on the search engines.

In reply to a search query, SEO is basically a strategy that helps the search engines to find and rank your website over than millions of various websites. Hence, SEO assists you greatly in gaining excessive traffic from the search engines.

What isSearch Engine Optimization (S.E.O)?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website to get organic traffic from the search results on search engines. It helps you determine your ranking factors in depth.

When entering your query on a specific search engine, such as Google, you will have a long list of results including query term (or keyword). The users tend to click those websites that are on the first page.

How they appear is due to the brilliant marketing method, Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Overall, SEO is about developing your website which can increase the quantity and quality of the traffic to it.

Research indicates that websites on the first page of Google achieve approximately 95% of clicks. Moreover, studies also address that results being a higher position can get more organic traffics and increase click-through rate (CTR).

There are more kinds of results that can be in the Google search results, like maps, images, videos, knowledge graphs and so on. SEO can contain improving visibility in these result as well.

SEO Terms

Sometimes, when doing SEO, you may feel difficult to some complicated and strange SEO terms. However, these terms are so important in SEO because they can be parameters or factors that affect your SEO strategy.

We don’t dig too deep into this aspect. You can have a complete list of them in other articles. In this part, we only focus on 11 fundamental SEO terms.

Anchor Text: Anchor text is hyperlinked text or the anchor to the link. Anchor text can help raise rankings.

Title Tag: Title tag – A title tag, or page title is a tag in the .html and can be seen on the tabs in your browser or in the headline of a search result.

Meta description: A meta description is another types of .html tag with the role of describing the page. The meta description can effect to click-through rates when showing up in search results.

SERP: SERP standing for Search Engine Results Page, is a page of results will be returned to you after you enter a search query.

Keywords: A keyword or keyword phrase that users enter into search engines, also called “search queries.”

Indexing:Indexing is search engines’ process of gathering and keeping data on the web. It means that the search engines will add a copy of a new page to their database, and can get it back later.

Links: Links – We have two types of links, internal and external. Internal links occur only in your website while external links come from others or to yours.

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the number of visitors who leave your website right away when viewing only a single page

On-Page: On-page optimization is an SEO method you can go directly to your website in order to improve its search ranking.

Off-Page: is how to improve your search ranking outside of your website.

Backlink: A “backlink” is created when an external website links to yours. This why some people refer to them as “external backlinks” or “inbound links”.

In addition, there are many other important SEO terms that SEOs often encounter. You can refer to the article Essential SEO Terms You Have To Know 2019, to better understand the common techniques when doing SEO

How SEO Formed?

SEO is pretty young and changes frequently. On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee created and launched the world’s first website, which is still live today. Following years, many websites appeared to offer information to users and became too crowded on the Internet. As a result, the first search engines filled a demand for structure and accessibility.

In 1993, Excite revolutionized how information was categorized. This way contributed to finding information easier by classifying results with keywords found in content.

In 1994, Alta Vista, Yahoo, and others joined the field to improve and simplify how data is indexed and delivered.

However, in 1996, SEO boomed up when Sergey Brin and Larry Page started to build what would be the biggest, most recognized search engine to date, BackRub, which eventually became Google and was registered as a domain in 1997.

Google found a chance to do something that other search engines couldn’t. They began developing algorithms that would reward quality, relevant content to connect users with what they really want to find.

From then to now, hundreds of algorithm have been made and updated continuously. Hence, SEO has rapidly evolved, forcing marketers to explore strategies following these algorithms.

Powerful Benefits of SEO

On the surface, SEO will definitely help improve a website’s overall including searchability and visibility.

The main goal of SEO is to indicate value information of your website to the search engines and help customers find your page easily. It means that when search engines identify it, your pages will rank highly for queries relevant to your content.

SEO helps in making your business discoverable by your target audience. If you publish content that is relevant to your target audience and SEO makes it easily discoverable on search engines, then your potential clients will come to your website. These visitors can then turn into leads, and if you can convert, they will become your paying clients, thereby increasing your sales.

However, there are more valuable functions that SEO can contribute to.

SEO helps gain organic traffic and improve visibility

As the picture shown, Google owns a significantly larger portion approximately 60% of the overall search market. When you can combine traffic from other search engines such as Facebook, Youtube, or Bing, your website can reach almost 70.6% of all traffic originates from a search engine.

Being supposed that you would like to run a party supply company. According to Google, the average search volume in the last 12 months is 165,000 people search for “party supplies”.

The first result in Google receives nearly 27.5% of all clicks according to the Advanced Web Ranking CTR study, that’s 45,375visitors to your website monthly if you are on the top.

If you have the right SEO strategy, you can rank for hundreds or even thousands of different keywords. Can you imagine that a tremendous amount of traffic will come to your website? and it is more wonderful when you get organic traffic without paying for Google?

With Google, organic results are considered the most relative, trustworthy, and authoritative websites or web pages.

For those who work SEO, organic searches lead to conversion and engagement rates of users.

According to users, they don’t like paid ads. Only 15%of the total traffic for a keyword comes from the paid ads.

In addition, it takes 5-7 impressions before someone remembers you. SEO will help improve impressions in Google. When having a high position, your website is more often visible to potential users.

Therefore, Google updates their algorithm countlessly but always focus on quality over quantity.

Increase your revenue

Let’s say the search volume of your target keyword is 10,000 per month.

If you do a great job of your SEO, and you rank as the top link in the search engine result page (SERP), you will get ~27,5% of the clicks, which means you will have 2.750 visitors to your website. These are essential leads. Assuming you are able to convert the leads to paying customers at a rate of 5%, you are going to get 138 new clients every month.

If your average deal size says, $100, then every month you will be booking sales worth $13.800

Low-Cost results in comparison to Adwords and PPC

You don’t need to pay for ads in SEO

Google’s organic rankings are based entirely on what its algorithm determines to be the best results for any given query. This means that once you’ve created a page that the search engine deems worthy of directing their users to, it can continue to attract traffic to your site for months (or even years) after you publish it.

Of course, researching and writing high-quality content requires an investment. That investment will either be in the form of time if you choose to create it yourself or money if you choose to hire a digital marketing agency to create it for you.

But once you’ve made that initial investment, there’s no ongoing cost to keep attracting traffic to your content.

SEO raises trust and credibility

Most 98% of all searchers have a tendency to click results which are on the first, second or third page results of Google search. Seldom will they continue to the sixth or seventh page because they think that results on top search have a higher trust and that’s why Google shows them first.

Branding and Sustainability

Frequently appearing at or near the top of what they search, users will start to follow you. SEO will be a long-term process for branding.

SEO also can bring a great deal of sustainability for a website.

SEO improves a better user experience

Google understands the importance of favorable or unfavorable user experience. Positive user experience is one of the influential factors to a website’s success.

If they cannot find what they want, visitors will leave the site immediately and bounce rate will increase incredibly. Google doesn’t like it.

Luckily, SEO has many metrics that can let know you more about your users like demographics, interests, locale, and device information. You can receive a great deal of information about how and where a user processes their decision-making.

Good SEO will bring a positive user experience, taking advantage of it to work in a brand’s favor.

SEO affects the buying cycle and maintain a relationship with your users

Entering a website, at least visitors have their belief. This period will determine whether visitors or customers.

Having SEO method to optimize information attracts them more. The business also creates sales marketing with promotion or coupon. When being attractive, visitors are willing to place orders and the buying cycle will generate.

In case, when the visitors want to find information or need help finding answers to questions, creating content to clarify these questions results in an ongoing relationship with your potential customers.

SEO is NOT relatively expensive

SEO is costly but it is worth and considered a true business investment. When you invest in SEO, the result you will get is the efforts that usually won’t happen for 6-9 months.

However, once the efforts begin to being realized, good SEO implementation will produce profit for years to come. The more investments SEO gets, the better it will be.

Furthermore, SEO can generate a higher R.O.I (Return on investment). According to statistics from Search Engine Journal, SEO brought about 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7% close rate.

SEO strengthens your competition

When you and your competitors are both executing SEO, you have to do a better performance than your competitor.

Putting a step ahead than the other businesses will be an advantage.

Who needs SEO?

The internet has created an opportunity to expand new boundaries between business and users around the world. A website is considered a communication “bridge” when it can convey valuable information to its users.

No matter what type of your business is, the highest priority is to let the whole world know you who you are on the Internet. Therefore, from E-Commerce to Blog always need SEO.

How does SEO work?

Figure out how people interact with Google

How people use Google has evolved over the years, but the chief steps of conducting a search haven’t changed largely. Most search processes go following

Having concerns or questions which need for an answer, solution, or piece of information.

Forming the need via words and phrases or “the query.”

Enter the query into Google.

Browse the results.

Click on a result.

Scan the result.

If unsatisfied, back to the search results and find other results.

Perform a new search to the query.

There are three kinds of search queries people generally do

“Do” Transactional Queries such as what songs do I want to listen

“Know” Informational Queries like what name of the best bookstore in New York City.

“Go” Navigation Queries, for example, where to go to the coffee shop with the internet.

When users query keyword into a search box and access your site, are they happy for the results? Google’s core goal is to address relevant results to users. So research to ensure what your target customers are looking for and your site can transfer it to them.

How does Search Google work?

Google has two crucial functions. First is crawling and indexing and the second is providing answers to the websites Google decides which are the most relevant.

Crawling and setting up an index

Google crawls and indexes the billions of words in documents, pages, files, news, videos, and media on the Internet through links.

Links let the search engines’ automated robots, known as “crawlers” or “spiders,” reach giant interconnected documents on the webs.

When discovering these pages, Google deciphers the code and accumulate selected information in massive databases. It will be recalled in future if needing for a search query.

To complete the extraordinary duty of holding billions of pages that can be accessed in a fraction of a second, the Google company have constructed datacenters all over the world. These amazing storage facilities store thousands of machines processing large quantities of information rapidly. When people query a search at Google, they demand results instantly. One or two-second delay can bring about dissatisfaction, so Google always tries to work hard to provide answers as fast as possible.

Showing answers

When Google receives a notification that there are people search for information, Google will do two things. First, Google returns only results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query. Second, it ranks results depending on the popularity of the websites having the information.

Search algorithms

Google ranking systems sort through hundreds of billions of web pages in the Search index to give you useful and relevant results in a fraction of a second.

Useful responses

With more content and in a wider variety on the Internet than ever before, Google makes sure to offer you search results in a range of rich formats to help you find the information you’re looking for quickly.

Methods to work with Google

Understanding how Google operates, these how we work with Google

Getting Indexed: Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted as they are found automatically. However, those which are not indexed should be done soon so that Google can crawl information in them

Avoiding Crawling: Sometimes, you don’t want “crawlers” or “spiders” penetrate undesirable contents. You can inform spiders not to crawl these files via the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain.

Enhancing prominence: Writing and updating contents frequently which includes high search volume keyword will tend to increase traffic and keep search engines crawling back to a site.

White hat vs black hat: White hat is a technique which is allowed by search engines while the black hat is not. White hat likely produce results that last a long time, whereas black hat predicts that their sites may eventually be penalized either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover any bad action.

How to do SEO?

SEO relates to two technical activities, On-Page, and Off-Page

On-Page Optimization

After you complete your Google SEO keyword research and have a list of Google SEO keywords you want to target, it’s time to write! Your SEO keywords need to appear in your content – just don’t overdo it or your content will look spammy.

Image file names/ALT attributes: First of all, include pictures in your Google SEO content! Pictures are attractive and appealing for readers, and Google also likes them. Use the keyword in the file names (e.g., how-to-catch-fish.jpg). Also, use the ALT attribute to tell search engines and users what the picture is with a keyword.

Anchor text: Link to your new page from several other pages on your site, using your keyword as the anchor text. This makes it easy for Google crawlers to find and rank your page.

Off – Page SEO

Link Building and Content Promotion. Increase visibility to your optimized content by sharing it on social networks and building links to your content. Be sure to create internally and build external links from outside sites. These activities are known as “Off-page SEO.”

Off-Page SEO is just a fancy way to say links. (Sometimes we call them backlinks, but it’s really the same thing.)

Google looks at each link on the web as a weighted vote. If you link to something, in Google’s eyes you’re saying, “This is worth checking out.” The more legit you are the more weight your vote carries.

Besides, there are many other jobs that you need to take the time to research, learn and practice yourself to improve your SEO.

How can I learn SEO?

The world of SEO is complex, but most people can easily understand the basics. Even a small amount of knowledge can make a big difference. Free SEO education is widely available on the web, including in guides like this. Combine this with a little practice and you are well on your way to becoming a guru.

Depending on your time commitment, your willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you may decide you need an expert to handle things for you. Firms that practice SEO can vary; some have a highly specialized focus, while others take a broader and more general approach.

In any case, it’s good to have a firm grasp of the core concepts.

If you are serious about improving search traffic and are unfamiliar with SEO, we recommend reading this guide front-to-back. We’ve tried to make it as concise as possible and easy to understand.

In Conclusion

To sum it up, SEO is a method to optimize your website so that search engines, Google will find and understand it easier, and then rank you in higher positions.

SEO is not a simple work. It requires great efforts to research, consider, evaluate and recheck.

A good SEO strategy can bring many advantages. However, no matter your plan is, you should comply with Google’s regulations to avoid penalties and gain ranking as higher as possible.